I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams [Hardcover]

Mark Dery (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 2012

From the preface by SF legend Bruce Sterling:

"Dery...brandishes a Diogenes lantern as the the smoke thickens on every side. ... Beset with Google erudition, [these essays] tackle a dizzying set of topics--even within the essays, within the very sentences, there are dizzying arrays of topics. ... He's very good at going into areas of culture you wouldn't care to visit yourself, and performing autopsies. He assesses each bone and organ in detail. Not in a crowd-pleasing way--he doesn't prettify it, culture-industrialize it and build a gift-shop at the door. Mark is like a Martian probe. He is high-tech. He is way out there, on his own. He came equipped with an onboard set of lenses and abrasion tools."

From the cultural critic Wired called "provocative and cuttingly humorous" comes a viciously funny, joltingly insightful collection of drive-by critiques of contemporary America where chaos is the new normal. Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche and the nethermost regions of the self--the gothic, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque--Mark Dery makes sense of the cultural dynamics of the American madhouse early in the twenty-first century.
Here are essays on the pornographic fantasies of Star Trek fans, Facebook as Limbo of the Lost, George W. Bush's fear of his inner queer, the theme-parking of the Holocaust, the homoerotic subtext of the Super Bowl, the hidden agendas of IQ tests, Santa's secret kinship with Satan, the sadism of dentists, Hitler's afterlife on YouTube, the sexual identity of 2001's HAL, the suicide note considered as a literary genre, the surrealist poetry of robot spam, the zombie apocalypse, Lady Gaga, the Church of Euthanasia, toy guns in the dream lives of American boys, and the polymorphous perversity of Madonna's big toe.
Dery casts a critical eye on the accepted order of things, boldly crossing into the intellectual no-fly zones demarcated by cultural warriors on both sides of America's ideological divide: controversy-phobic corporate media, blinkered academic elites, and middlebrow tastemakers. Intellectually omnivorous and promiscuously interdisciplinary, Dery's writing is a generalist's guilty pleasure in an age of nanospecialization and niche marketing. From Menckenesque polemics on American society and deft deconstructions of pop culture to unflinching personal essays in which Dery turns his scalpel-sharp wit on himself, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is a head-spinning intellectual ride through American dreams and American nightmares.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"More relevant than Mythologies, funnier than Travels in Hyperreality, more readable than Simulacra, less gloomy than Living in the End Times, smarter than Hitchens and without the pomposity, Dery's dazzling collection will, I unhesitatingly predict, become a classic of cultural criticism." - Jim Lawrence, Words, Noises and Other Stuff

"Whether writing about a severed head, toy gun lust, Lady Gaga, the Pope, Facebook, or Madonna's big toe, Dery indefatigably explores those dark corners of our collective, subconscious thoughts. [...] [A]  masterful mash-up of personal history, literary study, and philosophical rumination..." - Kate Walker, Notes for Headstones

"Dery wants to turn society over and shine some light on the dark, crawly things growing underneath it---and us."
  
[T]hese short, sharp, well-turned pieces...will make you look at the world in a whole new and rewardingly disturbing way."


- Deborah Sussman, Phoenix New Times

"Mark Dery’s cultural criticism is the stuff that nightmares are made of. He’s a witty and brilliant tour guide on an intellectual journey through our darkest desires and strangest inclinations. You can’t look away even if you want to." —Mark Frauenfelder and David Pescovitz, Boing Boing

"Mark Dery is gifted with sanity, humor, learning, and a prose style as keen as a barber’s razor. He applies those qualities to a trustworthy and entertaining analysis of the lunatic fringe, which constitutes an ever-larger portion of the discourse in America today." —Luc Sante

"Do not turn squeamish from the many considerations of death that lurk within—vampires, tombs, disease, corruption of many varieties. Mark Dery’s restless and stylish essay is concerned with one thing only—what it means to be alive in America." —Richard Rodriguez, author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America

"The bebop rhythms of Mark Dery’s prose reflect an intellectual excitement that is rare among contemporary cultural essayists. Reading him is like ingesting a powerful jolt of espresso." —Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars

"Always provocative, often humorous, Dery has a keen eye for absurdity, tragedy, and everything in between. " —Publishers Weekly

"Mark Dery is an intellectually challenging writer. He makes few concessions to his readers. He has high expectations...He is witty. He is amusing. He is stimulating. The essays will force you to examine ideas you more than likely have never thought about before." —Blogcritics.org

"What makes Dery such an appealing tour guide through all these bad thoughts of his is that he's right there with us, trying to answer the tough questions, and willing to turn his probing mind and eye on himself, too." —Phoenix New Times

"Mark Dery has just published I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams, a long-awaited compendium of his oft-brutal, usually funny, and always-brilliant writings on the curious, bizarre, and downright dark crevices of our culture. Look no further than this new book for your next monstrous dose of Dery." —Boing Boing

"Whether you're starting your spring break or just slacking off work for another week, there's no better way to wile away your idle hours than reading through Mark Dery's new collection of essays I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts." —Reason

"Dery is willing to tackle some tough and controversial subject matter—the Holocaust ‘industry’, for example—and examine it with rigor and willingness to upset conventional or comfortable opinion and piety." —PopMatters

"Dery invokes Hunter S Thompson, but not as a prankster - rather as a stylist and satirist, in a tradition that runs from Swift through Twain and implicitly on to Dery himself." —The Word

About the Author

Mark Dery is a cultural critic and journalist whose writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, Cabinet, Bookforum, and Boing Boing, among other publications. His books include Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture; The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink; and the widely republished pamphlet Culture Jamming. He is writing a biography of Edward Gorey.

Bruce Sterling is a science fiction author whose novels include Distraction, Zeitgeist, Holy Fire, and The Caryatids.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press (April 6, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816677735
• ISBN-13: 978-0816677733
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #652,661 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm a cultural critic. My essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams, will be published in April 2012 by University of Minnesota Press. I'm at work on a biography of the writer and artist Edward Gorey, which will be published by Little, Brown in 2013. I wrote The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999) and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996). I edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994); in my contribution to that anthology, "Black to the Future," I coined the term "Afro-futurism," now a thriving academic genre. My 1993 essay "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs" popularized the concept of "culture jamming."

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars From Hippo Press (NH) 3/30/2012 Issue March 30, 2012

By EricW.

Format:Hardcover

If you're one of those pain-in-the-neck smart people who see the idiocy on both sides of pretty much every dichotomy, from Democrat-v-Republican to jock-v-head, you'll like this guy. I've dug Dery's stuff for a few years now, having happened upon his work on the (very sadly) defunct True/Slant blog, which, looking back, was a super-rare Topps Rookie Stars bubble-gum-card collection of our greatest new journalists, such as Goldman Sachs-killer Matt Taibbi and porn-fascinated snark-dispenser Susannah Breslin.

Dery is hideously progressive, open-minded and New York avant-art-mongering, so be ready for that. If you're a news and/or culture junkie of a liberal/urban stripe, Dery's books will, I promise, wind up living on the same shelf as your Taibbi, Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson, not because of the implicit liberal slant but because you'll A) learn a bunch of cool stuff you never thought you wanted to know, and B) help your brain put out some psychic fires vis-à-vis our teetering American culture. This guy should be the content manager of google.com.

For instance, go reality-check his essay on Lady Gaga, which I've mentioned in a few of my own incoherent ravings on Big Corporate Music. After months of exposure to Gaga-this and Gaga-that vomited from the great media Matrix that keeps us all in line (you remember all that Gaga overexposure, right, before Katy Perry took it to a whole `nother level?), Dery - and I would have personally warned him not to do this if we were better acquainted - accidentally read a Sasha Frere-Jones article on Gaga. Frere-Jones's M.O. has always been an especially bovine blend of milquetoast-flavored suckup-ism toward and reverence for Corporate Rock. It's horrible, like reading Tom Friedman trying sneakily to justify the latest military "accidental" massacre of Middle Eastern civilians by hand-holding us through the big-picture importance of Kellie Pickler, but with fewer mixed metaphors.

Anyway, upon reading Frere-Jones's nonsense about Gaga, Dery's head finally exploded, and he went on an epic, Bowie-loving, can't-miss rant that should be required reading in every American high school. That one's here in this book.

Here's one I hadn't even thought about: non-jocks, especially guys who were bullied in school, thoroughly dreading and hating Super Bowl weekend (and don't we all, really, deep down? It's like a culture-somnabulist's Thanksgiving with Doritos instead of turkey, if you ask me). That piece, "Wimps, Wussies and W.," also covers how our modern conception of masculinity has been hijacked to mean blind obedience to authority rather than courageous, outside-the-box thinking.

In the wake of the Crocodile Hunter's death, Dery wrote a piece (that's here also) about animal attacks both wild and domestic. Delightfully gross stuff in there about killer whales, lions, "domesticated" chimps - did you know a grizzly bear can fit an entire human head in its mouth?

That last bit is what Dery's really all about. You know your buddy who likes watching bootleg videos of real deaths and stuff? Well, imagine that guy, but with intense insight into the hows and whys of each individual dismemberment, etc. and armed with one of the most fearsome vocabularies on the planet. That's Dery. He sees the information zeitgeist for what it is: a gigantic kerfluffle that's only in its gothic adolescence.

Not that he ever says so outright. That'd be too hick. A while back, I whined in some review someplace about his detachment: give those mean old dumb Republicans a nice beatdown, willya, was my intent there. But in this collection Dery solidifies his brand, not just by examining the nonsensical psychic sewage in which we all soak but by asking the right questions. And when he talks about himself ("Cortex Envy"), he's literally the greatest thing since sliced bread, at one point generally comparing his passive-aggressive, comics-fueled battles with his stepdad to a Greek tragedy starring Kevin Sorbo.

I was going to slap an A+ grade on this thing, but it's a collection of previously released items stockpiled over the last few years now, and some of it's actually still on the web, which I wasn't even going to tell you, but full disclosure and all that. But whatever, he deserves it, so I've changed my mind.

I'll warn you that you may or may not need thesaurus.com handy while you read this stuff, as he's not just a (former?) New Yawk lit professor but a good one. The thing about that, though, in this instance, is that the rewards are priceless, as are these deep, deep (bad) thoughts.

- Eric W. Saeger

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Bad Thoughts, Great Book March 27, 2012

By Supervert

Format:Hardcover

I find it impossible to discuss Mark Dery's I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts in anything other than the first person. The book speaks so eloquently of its time that, uncannily, I can't help but feel it speaks of me. So many of my own interests and obsessions rise from its pages -- death, deviance, intellect. I recognize my iTunes library in Dery's tours de force on David Bowie and Lady Gaga. I recognize my bookshelf in Dery's essay on Amok Books, whose productions were once textbooks in the éducation sentimentale of the counterculture. I recognize my own rhetorical strategies in the move Dery makes in "Toe Fou," updating George Bataille's meditation on the big toe by riffing on a picture of Madonna's bare feet. Weirdest of all, I recognize what I thought was my own obscure fondness for "invisible literature" in Dery's essay on the New York Academy of Medicine Library -- a place I too have plundered in quiet hours of mad and horrible research. Was I sitting across the table from you, Mark? I feel as though you, like Baudelaire, have addressed your book to "mon semblable, mon frère."

How is it that Dery is able to produce this uncanny feeling of identification? You get the sense that, while the rest of us were living the zeitgeist, Dery was holding a stethoscope to its heart. His essays are EKGs showing that our pulse goes haywire in the presence of extremes -- perversion, violence, satanism. In an introduction, Dery declares that it is "the writer's job" to "think bad thoughts": "to wander footloose through the mind's labyrinth, following the thread of any idea that reels you in, no matter how arcane or depraved, obscene or blasphemous, untouchably controversial, irreducibly complex, or preposterous on its face." All of us take in these abominations as they play across our flatscreens and iPhones, but Dery's distinction is to really think about them -- reflect on them, contextualize them, pursue their logic to sometimes unpalatable consequences. "The writer's job," he means to say, "is to transform 'bad thoughts' into good ones -- insights and observations -- through a process of examination." Will this thankless job now compel Dery to go in search of even worse thoughts? Perhaps the worst of all lies in the realization that there are so many bad thoughts, an inexhaustible supply, yet to be confronted.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Words on Bad Thoughts. April 2, 2012

By Graham Rae

Format:Hardcover

Mark Dery is a forward-thinking-and-looking writer who puts many of the more insane aspects of contemporary life under a magnifying glass and dissects them with fearsome insight and intellect. As befits a modern splintered age of no common morality or life-threads or belief systems, he approaches his subjects with a pathology-anthropologist's eye and holds up some of the darker areas of life to wriggle complaining under the concise blinding light of his deep-dish musings and extrapolations about their (im)possible meanings and potential future directions. As noted science fiction writer Bruce Sterling sagely notes in his introduction, Dery "brandishes a Diogenes lantern as the smoke thickens on every side" and these "Google erudition" pieces that comprise the book (ranging from 1996-2011) read "like the contents of bottles pitched into the sea."

And what of the contents of these electronic-disinformation-sea-bobbing vessels? Well, if bemused and fascinating musings on subjects as diverse as the homoeroticism of George W. Bush, how Lady Gaga stands up in comparison to previous gender-and-agenda-bender bi-curious rockers, current zombie apocalypse obsession, Dadaist spam poetry, the homosexuality quotient of the tiresome Super Bowl (Dery does not shy away from any sexual matter, straight or not), Mayan apocalypse cultists, fundamentalist religion pamphleteers, the suicide note as a literary subgenre, the fascist-identifying proclivities of Prince Harry, and on and on (you get the general hyper-eclectic-discussions gist) interest you, then you will absolutely love this book. With a spunky, funky sensibility informed in parts by the late 70s American punk of his youth, alternative literature and an endlessly inquiring mind, Dery gleefully picks up a great many taboo-subject rocks, shows us what's squirming sightless unseen underneath them, then crushes the stupidity of the more deserving targets to death with the selfsame stone.

On a technical level, Dery is an excellent writer, approaching his subject matter with a wry, sometimes uproarious spiketop sense of humor which helps to leaven some of his more serious discussions. Dery does tend to dwell a lot on the darker side of life, which can make for uncomfortable and somewhat frightening, if enlightening, reading. It strikes me there's a slightly schoolboy prurience (back to punk and nihilism again) to the glee-degree with which he jumps into some of humanity's bleakest corners, but his reports back on the long dark night of our ever-evaporating soul are always done with a judicious amount of redeeming humanity, a lack of identification with the insane, and a sense of genuine human curiosity and inquiry. He does not fetishise stuff like the sickest corners of the net's sexual representation, he just says here's what I found and saw during examining this crash on the information superhighway, here's what I made of it, nothing hugely interesting to see here, move along, move along.